


promise me you’ll try to be an absolute disgrace

by piggy09



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 15:42:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19406338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: “Why did you kidnap me again?" Irina asks.





	promise me you’ll try to be an absolute disgrace

**Author's Note:**

> HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAM! If you are reading this go look at [Cam's art](https://www.instagram.com/camconfetti/), because I certainly do whenever I need to feel things about Killing Eve. I feel things when I'm with your art, Cam.
> 
> [warnings: canon-typical violence/death/etc., reference to pedophilia]

“Why did you kidnap me again? Is it because of my dad?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, why else would you even—”

“Eat your ice cream,” says Oksana, even though she’s not eating hers. She’s just stabbing the spoon into her melting bowl of vanilla (boring) and watching it melt more and squish around. She’s slumped down in her side of the red booth. She looks miserable.

“I’m not hungry,” Irina says.

“Too bad.”

“If I eat the ice cream, can I go home? I have to study.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I _do_ , I have a test tomorrow.”

“Surprise! Now you don’t.”

Oksana hasn’t looked up from her ice cream the whole time she’s been doing this. Her face looks like a bowl of melting vanilla that someone is stabbing a spoon into: sad and boring. Melty around the edges. Irina eats a bite of her Double Fudge Chocolate Chip Blast and looks around the other booths in the ice cream shop: a few people, but no one who could take Oksana in a fight. It wouldn’t be worth trying to wave to them, because Oksana would just kill them, and then she’d probably kill Irina, and. And. You know. And.

So Irina looks back at Oksana, who’s moved on to sort of pushing her ice cream around in her bowl. She’s wearing a black sweater and tight grey jeans; her hair is up in a messy bun. She looks really tired, and even more sad than she looked when Irina looked at her ten seconds ago.

Last time—

(and it’s so stupid that Irina can think _oh, last time I was kidnapped, blah blah_ )

—Oksana had been more awake, and it hadn’t ever seemed like she’d given a shit about killing Irina. Like, she would have done it if she’d had to, but mostly it was just a weird fun trip that they went on for a day. She bought Irina lunch. She didn’t show up at Irina’s school with her eyes all cold and twitchy and desperate and say _come on, we’re leaving. We’re leaving now or I’ll—_

“Why can’t I go back to school,” Irina says.

“Don’t kids hate school? You should be thanking me, this is like an early summer vacation for you.”

“You’re avoiding all of my questions,” Irina says. “It’s really obvious.”

Oksana makes a scrunched-up mocking face and then scoops a spoonful of vanilla, lets it plop back into her bowl. “And why did you order vanilla?” Irina says, barreling along and listening to her mouth talk from eighty miles away. “It’s the worst flavor. You aren’t even eating it. What happened? Did another one of your girlfriends shoot herself or something?”

Oksanas black boot nudges into Irina’s thigh under the table. Irina looks under the table and straight into the muzzle of a gun, which is staring at her with the black void that’s also in the center of Oksana’s eyes. Irina sits back up again.

“It’s really boring, right?” Oksana says, scooping the ice cream around, looking more and more frantic. “Vanilla. It’s like, why would anybody even _want_ this. You see someone else eating it and then you think _huh, maybe I would like vanilla, if it’s with the right person,_ and then the right person is like _oh actually I’m lactose intolerant_ even though she isn’t at all and then you have to go kidnap a baby and eat ice cream with _her_ —”

“I think that’s illegal,” Irina says, even though the smart part of her brain is yelling _SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHE HAS A GUN AND THIS TIME SHE’LL ACTUALLY USE IT_.

“Kidnapping?” Oksana says, coming to a confused stop. “Because—”

“Having sex with me,” Irina says. “That’s what the ice cream metaphor is about, right? You wanted to do weird sex stuff with your girlfriend and now she won’t do it with you. You’d better not do it with _me_ , you _said_ you weren’t a pedophile.”

Oksana’s eyes and mouth go wide, and then she bursts into laughter – the entire shop looks at them and Irina gives them a grimace that she hopes says _haha, my mom or sister or whatever is crazy right_ instead of _ladies and gentlemen I might die here in this ice cream shop because I didn’t understand some stupid assassin’s stupid metaphor_.

“Oh man,” Oksana says, a grin still pulling up the edges of her mouth. “You little idiot. I forgot how totally shitty you are.”

Both of her hands (gunless) reach out and pull Irina’s bowl of Double Fudge Chocolate Chip Blast across the table. “You aren’t eating this, right? Vanilla’s gross. The worst flavor.”

“Yeah,” Irina says, “the worst.” She watches the vanilla pool and get sticky in its bowl. When that lady had shot herself, it actually hadn’t looked anything like this at all.

* * *

The first thing Oksana does when they get to the hotel room is yank out the phone from the wall, open the window, and drop it from the window two stories down to the street. Crash.

“Don’t get any ideas, okay?” she says cheerily, before dropping onto the middle of the king-sized bed. “Oof. Wow, I’m _really_ tired.”

Irina carefully sits down next to her. She doesn’t see the gun, but that doesn’t mean that Oksana doesn’t have it. She feels a sudden sharp sting of pain – just metaphorical pain, emotional pain, stupid emotional pain. She misses her math class. She really did have a test tomorrow, and now she won’t take it, and Ivan will take top of the class, and he won’t even know that Irina is dead. If she dies. In this stupid shitty hotel room.

“You still haven’t told me why you kidnapped me,” she mumbles.

“That’s what my boss did to _me_ ,” Oksana says, “when she decided it was time to teach me how to be good at killing and stuff. I was in elementary school, I was a baby. She just showed up and – poof! – gave me a gun, and then I started killing people with it. Badass.”

“I don’t want to learn to fire a gun,” Irina says. She digs her nails into her palms as hard as she can so she doesn’t cry, because she doesn’t want to cry in front of this bitch. She won’t let herself.

“That’s what I said too,” Oksana says. She sits up and nudges her shoulder companionably against Irina’s. “Come on, stop looking so sad! It’ll be fun, I promise. The first time can be…” she trails off. Irina lets her eyes jump there-away from Oksana’s face, but the caution doesn’t matter: Oksana isn’t here, she’s somewhere else. Her eyes are far away.

Then she blinks, and comes back. “—a little crazy, but after that? Pfft. No problem. Come on! Where’s your sense of adventure.”

“I left it at home,” Irina says. “Can I go get it?”

“Nope,” Oksana says. She pops the _p_ sound.

“Okay,” Irina says. She swallows; she thinks about her dad, she thinks about the broken shards of telephone lying in the middle of the street. She thinks about the way Oksana’s eyes keep turning into taxidermy Oksana eyes, like she’s already dead and stuffed and she’s just now starting to figure it out.

“Do I have to learn from you?” she says. “I bet you’re a really bad teacher.”

“Shut up, I’m the best.” Oksana reaches into her back pocket and holds up the gun, brightly, triumphantly. It doesn’t look like much, if you don’t think about the fact that it’s a gun. It could be pretty much anything. A toy. A stupid novelty lighter.

“Here,” Oksana says, “give me your hand.”

“What if I shoot you.”

Oksana makes a _pfft_ noise that says she finds that idea stupid, and funny, and stupidly funny. Irina holds out her right hand and Oksana carefully fits the gun into it, coaxes Irina’s finger around the trigger with something like tenderness. When she lets go, Irina is holding the gun; it’s pointed at Oksana, and it’s trembling a little bit.

“Stop shaking, the safety’s on,” Oksana says. “All you could do is smack me with it, but you have no upper body strength so it wouldn’t do shit. Got it?”

“I have upper body strength,” Irina says. “I do Muay Thai.”

“Of course you do, baby Bond,” Oksana says. “Wave it around a little bit! Have fun. Come on. Act like you’re robbing a bank or something.”

Irina waves the gun around a little bit. She aims it at the lamp, the window, the bedpost. She aims it at Oksana. _Your cold black heart_ , whispers the woman in Irina’s brain, if that’s what she’d said. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Irina’s completely forgotten what she said, so in a way she just now sort of killed her again.

Oksana beams and splays her hands out: _don’t shoot_. “See?” she says. “A little fun, right?”

“A little fun,” Irina admits.

“Good,” Oksana says. “Now give it back.”

She holds out her hand. The red splatter of blood against the wall: a memory that Irina has. She doesn’t want it. She hands it back to Oksana, who shoves the gun back into her jeans pocket.

“Step one,” Oksana says. “Or, like, half of step one. We’re doing baby steps for your stubby little legs.”

“My legs are regular sized, I’m just a _kid_.”

“Yeah sure.” Oksana reaches out and actually ruffles Irina’s hair with the heel of her hand, like she gives a shit. Then she flops onto the bed. “If you kick in your sleep I’m shooting you, by the way.”

Irina lies down next to her. They’re both fully dressed, and the sun is still up, but she thinks she could fall asleep anyways.

“I don’t kick,” she says.

“Do you snore?”

“No, I don’t _snore_.”

“If you have any nightmares, I’m not doing anything.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck _you_.”

“Fuck you,” Irina says, and watches the cracks in the ceiling, and doesn’t blink.

* * *

In the middle of the night she wakes up shivering, cold, and furiously terrified. She listens to the slow rasp of Oksana’s breathing. She sits up. She puts one foot on the ground.

“Don’t even think about it,” Oksana murmurs sleepily. (Irina jumps, almost screams, doesn’t scream.) “C’mere.”

Irina stares at her foot on the ground, her cold foot, her living foot. Slowly, she pulls her foot back into the bed. She comes there.

Oksana radiates heat like a furnace, and cuddles like an octopus. She’s warm and soft and comfortable and Irina doesn’t fall back asleep for over an hour. She listens to that breathing – in, out – and the hammering of her own frantic heart.

* * *

The next day, Oksana makes her shoot pinecones in a deserted field that they hitchhike to. (“Why _pinecones?_ ” “Because they’re small and stupid like you. Shut up.”) Irina keeps missing them and Oksana just watches; she doesn’t even make any snarky comments or anything. After the third time Irina reloads the gun, Oksana pulls it from her hand and fires three times: bang bang bang. Each shot hits.

“Relax,” Oksana says. “You look like a baby holding a blanket. Just – you know, shoot better. Can you do that?”

“I’m not a _baby_ ,” Irina snarls, and she kicks her leg up – there – slaps Oksana across the face with the flat of her boot. Oksana goes down, hard, in the dirt. Makes a _whff_ noise as her tailbone slams against the ground.

“ _Ow_ ,” she whines. “You motherfucker. I forgot you could do that.”

“I’m not a baby,” Irina says again, and Oksana flaps her hand: _yeah, yeah_.

“Man,” she says. “You keep surprising me, huh?” She murmurs that like a weird secret, scrubbing at the back of her neck, smiling at the dirt like it’s beautiful and desperately, stupidly in love with her.

“Stop thinking about your girlfriend when you’re with me, you freak,” Irina says, and Oksana laughs again. Thank God. She lets out that same stupid goofy cackle, surprised and delighted.

“You aren’t on her level yet, Jackie Chan Junior,” she says, heaving herself back onto her feet. “She stabbed me in the stomach. You ever stabbed someone? Huh?”

“No, I haven’t _stabbed_ anyone,” Irina says. “Adults are so weird. Why do you even do that to someone if you’re dating them.”

Oksana shrugs a shoulder, peaceably hands the gun back over to Irina. “I don’t know,” she says. “Love is fucking crazy. Adults fall in love and we just go _crazy_ , like, whoa. You’re lucky you haven’t hit puberty yet, it gets _wild_.”

“I _have_ hit puberty.”

“Yeah, sure,” Oksana says, “but can you hit a pinecone?”

Irina looks at Oksana and fires the gun without looking. It misses the pinecone completely.

“Super cool,” Oksana says, her voice completely flat. “Okay. We can still fix this. Spread your legs apart a little bit? Yeah, good, now center your weight—”

* * *

She takes Irina out to dinner to celebrate. Before that she takes Irina shopping – to celebrate – and she frowns at Irina for a second before handing her a white blouse that’s unbelievably soft to the touch and a pair of fine black trousers that reflect the light like knife blades.

In the dressing room, she turns her back and whistles to herself while Irina changes. Then she puts her hands on Irina’s upper arms, tilts Irina back and forth, reaches up a hand to pull Irina’s hair back away from her face. She fluffs it up a little bit. In the mirror Irina looks like a beautiful stranger; she looks like someone who could kill, maybe, or who could at least consider it.

Oksana buys herself a dark blue dress that looks like midnight, and makes Irina’s heart flutter a little bit and go _oh jeez, oh shit, oh wow_. (She _has_ hit puberty.) (Like, she knows.) (She would rather die than tell Oksana about it.) She doesn’t say anything about the dress. She also doesn’t say anything about how good the food is – even though it is really good, probably the best food Irina’s ever eaten. The restaurant is dark, the kind of dark cold hush that rich people like. Some of the food has foam on it. Even the foam tastes good.

“So?” Irina says, licking the last bit of foam off of her fork. “Are you gonna tell me about your girlfriend now?”

Oksana’s face makes three different versions of the same _what?!_ expression. “Are you serious?” she says. “You’re way too young to hear about all of the kinky sex we have, you said that already.” She raises her eyebrows all the way up and drinks some of her wine.

“Yeah,” Irina says, “but you’re obviously dying to talk about her.”

“What? No I’m not.” She super is.

“You super are,” Irina says. She leans across the table and swipes up Oksana’s foam with her fork, because Oksana isn’t eating it and all the little bubbles are popping. When she raises her fork to her mouth she tastes spring. The foam evaporates so quickly it’s like it wasn’t even there, but her whole mouth tastes like spring.

“I’m not,” Oksana says; her voice is like a wilted bouquet, pathetic and depressing and lonely.

“What’s her name.”

“Eve,” Oksana says, and then she says “ _urgh_ ,” and then she says “Okay maybe I want to talk about her a _little_.”

“I told—”

“You shut your mouth. Her name is Eve, and she has very nice hair, and—”

“—oh my god, she’s the one from the—”

“I said shut _up_.”

“You guys were totally eye-fucking, I knew it.”

“I will kill you,” she says, but she doesn’t really seem like she means it. It isn’t the Oksana from the ice cream shop; this Oksana is excited and very alive. _Eve_. Irina remembers her sort of looking like a potato. A worried potato. But if that’s what Oksana is into then whatever.

“ _Anyways_ ,” Oksana says, “her name is Eve, and we went on a holiday to Rome, and – I don’t know. I thought things were getting _serious!_ I’d done stuff with her that I’d never—”

“ _Gross_.”

“I was talking about _murder_ , you little pervert. So I thought we were going to…I just…I just liked her a lot, you know? And now she’s gone.”

“Gone gone?”

Oksana shrugs one shoulder; the billowing blue of her sleeve ripples like dark water. “Probably not,” she says in a guilty little voice.

“But like maybe.”

“Like…eighty percent she’s not _gone_ gone.”

“Did she shoot herself?”

“No,” Oksana says, “there was an accident.” The waiter swoops in to take their plates and politely ask if they want dessert – “yes, obviously,” Oksana says – and then even more politely vanishes again.

“So _you_ shot her,” Irina says.

“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this stuff, you are a miniature arsehole. A little fun-sized bag of dogshit.”

“Good thing I am,” Irina says. “Because if you liked me you would probably shoot me, right?”

For a second Oksana’s face lights up with some young feeling – younger than Irina, younger than Irina’s been in a long time. Hurt, maybe. Surprise and hurt.

“Probably,” Oksana says hoarsely. She tips more wine down her throat; she fiddles with the sleeves of her dress, she touches two fingertips to her belly and then takes them away again. If Irina has to watch her eyes become glass again she’ll start screaming and she won’t ever stop.

“So did you fuck?” she says. “Or are death and sex pretty much the same thing for you. Because if that’s true I _really_ don’t want to shoot someone with you, okay?”

Oksana sticks her tongue out. Irina, the mature adult in the situation, flips her off.

“She’s shy,” Oksana says. “Also she thought she was straight for a while.”

“Ew.”

“I know, right?” Oksana says, and she launches into some anecdote about Eve – something about Eve’s tender violence, or violent tenderness, or whatever the shit. Her eyes light up all the way, finally, and Irina hates Eve a little bit for walking away and leaving Irina with this: some dead thing that only comes back to life for the memory of someone else. Really shitty of Eve to do.

Oksana talks about Eve all the way through dessert, which is even better than the dinner was. There are dollops of pale yellow cream on the plate; when Irina puts a spoonful of one onto her tongue, it tastes like every dream of summer she’s ever had.

* * *

One pinecone falls off a distant fence, and then a second, and then a third; Oksana, in the hazy corner of Irina’s vision, is made up entirely of her smile. The sparking of white teeth.

* * *

“Good news!” Oksana yells, as she bursts into the hotel room.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Irina yells, fumbling and dropping the comic book she had smuggled out of the shop next door. “What is wrong with you? Didn’t anyone teach you manners, ever?”

“I have a job,” Oksana says. “Which means _we_ have a job.” She bounces down onto the bed next to Irina, kicks her feet up in the air. “Eh?”

“I’m not ready,” Irina says, closing the comic book and putting it carefully down on the bed next to her.

“What? Yeah you are. People are bigger than pinecones, you’ll be fine.” Oksana blinks at whatever feeling Irina isn’t able to hide from the bottom of her eyes, and then she looks away and taps her fingers on the bedspread. “Besides,” she says, “I’ll be there. You don’t have to do it alone.” Like an afterthought, she adds: “Irina.”

“I didn’t think you knew my name.”

“Of course I know your name, don’t be ridiculous. So? Are you ready now? Or are you just going to sit here and read and be boring.”

“Who are we even killing,” Irina says.

“I don’t know,” Oksana says. “Some guy. Lots of money, which means lots of good food and lots of good clothes. Earn your keep, you little urchin.”

Irina swallows down the hard rock in her throat and forces her eyes into a roll. “Fine,” she says. “But I want to be the distraction, I don’t want to shoot him. I’m a _kid_ , you can’t make me do that.”

“Hey,” Oksana says. She turns towards Irina and her face flickers down into something solemn. “Listen to me,” she says. “At some point you have to figure out if you’re a baby or not a baby, okay? You can’t just switch back and forth all the time because you’re scared. Either you want it or you don’t want it. Being an adult I mean. You can’t spend forever telling me that you’re not a baby over and over again and then the second I say you’re not a baby you’re like _oh, no, actually I’m too little, I can’t do this, I won’t do this, I take it back—_ ”

She blows out a breath through her teeth; her eyes glaze over again with Eve, and then she blinks it away. Irina breathes in. Irina breathes out. She looks back to Oksana: her serious, sparkling face. _Fine_ , Irina says again, but only with her eyes. She holds out her hand for the gun.

“There you go,” Oksana says. A smile ticks up the corner of her mouth; she nestles the pistol into Irina’s hand.

* * *

Some Guy has a townhouse in a part of town with no trash on the street. Oksana leads them in a twisting route through backyards and under children’s swingsets and through the dark, all the way through the dark, up to Some Guy’s unlit back door. She unlocks it – it’s too dark, Irina can’t see how. With a key? With a lockpick? Not with the gun, Irina is holding the gun. The weight of it in her hand is impossible to mistake for a toy or a novelty lighter. She is holding a gun.

Click.

The door opens and Oksana ushers Irina inside, a finger held to her lips, her eyes shining in the dark. Irina follows.

“We don’t need to be too sneaky,” Oksana breathes into Irina’s ear as they walk through the life of Some Guy: the neat blue-and-yellow tiled floor of his kitchen, the refrigerator with photographs Irina can’t see in the dark (she misses her dad). “We just don’t want him getting the jump on us or anything. You don’t have to pretend that he shot himself, we’re just going to shoot him and leave. You aren’t going to puke, are you?”

“I don’t puke,” Irina says.

“Good for you,” Oksana says; in the dark Irina can’t tell if her face is sincere or mocking. They go up the stairs – feet up close to the wall. Family photographs on the wall. Ugly carpeting on the stairs. Some Guy has bad taste in rugs, Irina guesses.

There is only one person asleep in the master bedroom. The other half of the bed: empty. Some Guy is sprawled diagonally across, taking up all the space, and he’s snoring; he probably looks exactly like his photograph, but Irina never saw his photograph. She has no idea what he’s supposed to look like at all.

They ghost their way to the side of the bed, and Oksana rolls her eyes and mutters: “This kind is always so _boring_. Oh, hey! You could check his fridge on the way out, that’s cool. Interpol doesn’t have your fingerprints or anything, right?”

“You talk a lot,” Irina says. Her voice is steady, and her hands are steady. She raises the gun (steadily) and the silencer brushes the tip of the man’s forehead. Which would be fine, except for the way that his eyelids flutter and his face twitches, dream-frowning, and then he murmurs something and oh – shit – he wakes up, eyes snapping open. His eyes aren’t the color Irina expected them to be, and she’s so distracted by that that those eyes roll around to her, and the mouth opens:

“What the _fuck?!_ ”

Irina freezes like a deer in the headlights, which is stupid. It’s stupid because she’s never even seen a deer, and it’s stupid because she never froze up around Oksana, and it’s stupid because it’s giving him time to sit up and it’s giving the veins in his throat time to bulge and he’s looming – for what – to shove her or to go for a gun in his bedside drawer and time slows to a dribble and:

  1. a soft hand claps itself over Irina’s eyes
  2. another soft hand snatches the gun from Irina’s fingers
  3. there’s the indescribable thunder-sound of someone’s skull exploding
  4. Irina realizes that her face is wet.



Silence in the bedroom. There’s a slow drip, like a faucet left running. Like a faucet made of bone and meat, left running.

“You know I already saw someone get their head blown up, right?” Irina says into the silence. She doesn’t lift Oksana’s hand off her face.

“Yeah,” Oksana says. “I know.” Her voice creaks.

“Just checking,” Irina says. She swallows; it’s painful in her dry throat. “Hey,” she says. “Can we not go through his fridge on the way out?”

“Sure,” Oksana says. She pivots Irina around and pushes her out the door of the bedroom. On the landing by the staircase she stops and lifts her hand from Irina’s eyes – only Irina is faster, and she’s able to clap Oksana’s palm back.

“I might puke, actually,” she says.

“Don’t you _dare_ puke,” says Oksana, and the tone of her voice says that she knows Irina is lying. She guides Irina down the stairs and out the back door and into the yard and when they get to the yard Irina grabs fistfuls of grass and scrubs at her face until it itches and stings. The grass is wet with dew. She holds it tight in her hands, so tight it scratches at her palms. Finally she opens her eyes and looks at Oksana.

“See?” Oksana says, voice as soft and careful as her face. “I told you. Totally boring. Come on, I want a coffee.”

Irina follows her, and then catches up. They walk together in total, complete silence. A dog is barking somewhere. Oksana’s breathing is steady and quiet; the night air is cold.

Irina folds her arms over her chest. She squeezes.

“I messed it up, right?” she says, in a different stranger’s backyard. Around the rusted barbecue, through the gate, onto the sidewalk with its twilight streetlights. They settle in next to each other in the middle of the street, walking in almost perfect synchronicity. Oksana isn’t looking at Irina at all.

“Pfft,” Oksana says, lifting a shoulder. “Like this was all a big test for you or something? It’s a job. It got done. We get _money_ , so. Good work all around.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe a little bit,” Oksana says easily. “Maybe you screwed up big time in there. Or maybe I—maybe it’s good that you can’t do it yet, you know? Like, like baby steps. For your baby legs.”

 _I’m not a baby_ , Irina says, only she doesn’t: she swallows it down. She thinks about Some Guy’s wife coming home tomorrow, putting the keys in the clumsy handmade dish in the blue-and-yellow kitchen. She thinks of her calling his name, over and over, and the way she’d run upstairs, and the way she’d fall to her knees in front of the bed and the disgusting smell and the meat stains all over the wall. Her daughter would be pulled out of school; someone would come to the door of her classroom, say _there’s an emergency_. Everyone in the classroom would turn to stare at her with wide eyes, and then – right then – she’d be different. She would be a separate thing from everyone else in that room, even if she didn’t know it yet.

“You’d better buy me a coffee too,” she says; the sound echoes in the dark.

“You’ll stunt your growth,” Oksana says.

“Fuck you.”

“You’ll be thanking me in five years when you can actually reach the top shelf, eh?”

Irina snaps at her, and Oksana snaps back, and they pretend that it’s easy. Oksana has blood drying on her hand, and spraying all the way up her arm. Irina still has fistfuls of grass. As they keep walking she lets them go, one by one – or tries to. They stick to her palms. She shakes and shakes and shakes and they won’t fall off of her; they just won’t leave her alone.

* * *

She dreams about the woman who knew Oksana’s name.

* * *

Oksana gives Irina a stack of money the size of an airport paperback, and doesn’t say anything about it; in the days that follow Irina takes to wandering around the city, walking into shops and out of them again without buying anything. There isn’t really anything that she wants.

Every night she eats dinner with Oksana, and Oksana talks about Eve and also about Oksana and sometimes about other people who aren’t Oksana or Eve. The endings to these other stories are always ambiguous, which probably means the people in the stories are no longer alive. Irina tries not to remember their names in case she ends up dreaming about them. Instead she talks about school – her shitty math teacher (“We could go kill him, if you wanted”) and Sophia, with the streak of blue she’s put into her hair (“She sounds like a babe. Ha, you’re blushing!”) and Ivan, who is a douche. (Oksana agrees.) She tells Oksana how she wants to work in the space program – not to be the astronaut, but to be the person who decides how and where and when to make the rockets go. A lot of calculating angles.

“You’d be good with a sniper rifle, huh?” Oksana says, leaning back in the seat of the gross greasy pizza joint they’ve wandered into. (It’s phenomenally good pizza; Oksana can just sniff this stuff out somehow.) “That’s all—” she waves a hand vaguely. “Angles. And distance. You don’t have to be, you know, _right there_.”

Irina takes too long to answer, she guesses, because Oksana’s face cracks painfully into a smile. She rolls her eyes. “Just a _joke_ , you little nerd. Come on, eat your pizza. Get those nutrients.”

“When are we going to get another job?” Irina says. She lifts up her pizza and takes a bite and does not look away from the pizza. The grease has bled

through the paper plate and onto the table, leaving smears that shine in the fluorescent light.

“Mm, I don’t know,” Oksana says. “Soon. Are you excited?”

“Like I could ever be as horny for murder as you are,” Irina says, and bites down.

* * *

Irina doesn’t actually know if the stories Oksana is telling her are true. Not the Eve ones – Eve is too boring to be anything but real – but the Oksana stories. The shit about her dad. Stories about prison. Oksana starts on these stories and then drops them and then picks them up again two hours later, walking down the street, not making eye contact with Irina at all. She just talks and talks and talks. She says _when I was twelve and in boarding school_ and also she says _when I was thirteen and had just killed another foster dad_ and also she says _when I was eleven and my mother the queen_ so who knows.

Maybe Oksana just wants to talk to somebody.

The thought is desperately pathetic, and Irina tries not to think about it because she knows it’s probably true. She lets Oksana buy her clothes and buy her dinners and tell her completely bullshit stories about when Oksana was a kid who fell in love with her French teacher; she lets Oksana talk and talk, desperately, like she thinks eventually she’ll reach the end of all of her words and be done.

* * *

At one dinner, Oksana bullies Irina into drinking a glass of champagne (“You have to _try_ it, at least, come on”) and Irina doesn’t have to pretend to like it. It tastes like a sour sky, and when they clink their glasses together the sound rings in Irina’s ears for minutes.

Afterwards, in the dark street – on the slightly-tipsy walk back to their hotel – Oksana says: “Oh, that was a celebration dinner! By the way. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

And then Irina is awake.

“Another job?” she says. Oksana doesn’t say anything; when Irina looks at her, straight on, she sees Oksana grinning like a death mask. Irina looks away again.

“Wow,” she tells the pavement, “that took you forever. You getting slow in your old age or something?”

“Nobody in this city serves good champagne,” Oksana says, stretching and reaching her arms towards the sky. “And I wasn’t going to let you go until you had good champagne, eh? Tell me it wasn’t worth it.”

“The champagne was good,” Irina says. “All the rest of this? Shitty.”

“That’s a total lie, I see you stare at yourself in the mirror for like thrity minutes every day, you _love_ all of your cool clothes and the good food and the city and the money and the life. You’re not a good enough liar yet to pretend otherwise, mini Macchiavelli.”

“I don’t even know who that is.”

“And what do you know, you’re still a bad liar.”

But Oksana lets it go, weirdly enough – so Irina doesn’t have to confess to it, the fact that she does like the clothes and the food and listening to Oksana ramble about the recipe to Eve’s favorite shepherd’s pie. She could live like this, probably. Probably she could live like this; probably after a while she wouldn’t even want to leave.

It takes no time to pack up their things (even though Oksana has suitcases full of clothes) and take a taxi to the bus station and then lie and sneak and cheat their way onto a bus. It’s one of the sleeper ones; they grab a few plush seats by a politely curtained window and stay there. The seconds and the scenery roll by outside the glass.

It takes about three minutes and twenty seconds before Oksana becomes noticeably bored; she makes Irina play _I Spy_ with her, and then stops when she realizes that they’re both very bad at it. She makes up little secretive games to play that involve spying on other people on the bus. Eventually, she trails off into silence. She looks out the window. She scratches her stomach a lot.

 _What’s the job?_ Irina asks her. _What are we going to do? What am I going to do?_

She asks that only with her eyes, but Oksana isn’t looking at her so Oksana can’t answer. Instead Irina has to look at the back of her head; she’s squirmed into the window seat and is looking out the window like a cat watching a sky full of birds. Irina watches Oksana watch everything else for a while, and then she watches Oksana rummage through her pockets and pull out a knife. She starts slowly and patiently carving a heart into the bottom corner of the window. Irina watches it form, piece by piece, and then she watches the scenery outside, and then she watches the heart again.

Oksana meets Irina’s eyes in the glass and turns around. Her face is weirdly flat when she holds out the knife – dead center in her open palm, the handle ornate and carved with roses. Irina snatches it from her hand and climbs over Oksana to the window. She jabs away at the glass until the heart is finished.

When it’s done, she folds up the knife and puts it in the pocket of her jacket. With her empty hand she reaches out and traces her fingers along the jagged edge of the heart. “Where is this bus going?” she says.

“Somewhere,” Oksana says. “Are you going to run away when it stops?”

“I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“You have the whole world, Villanette.”

The words are soft and heavy; they scratch uncomfortably at Irina’s spine. She finds herself hunching her shoulders.

“I guess,” she says. She leans forward, closer to the window, cranes her head so she can see the very top of the sky. The invisible stars. The bus rolls on, coughing to itself occasionally; Oksana starts twitching again, so Irina gives her back the window seat. She dozes. She makes up problems in her head that she can solve. She wakes up and then she falls back asleep again.

The bus grumbles and complains as it creaks to a stop – and all of the passengers do the same as they stand, stretch, amble towards the exit. Irina turns to nudge Oksana, but she’s already awake. “Go,” Oksana says, “come on, hurry up, I have to pee.”

“Gross,” Irina says, and she stands up on her jelly-legs and stretches. Oksana shoves herself past, bouncing towards the exit; in her absence there is only the heart carved on the window, and in the center of it a painstaking dagger-sharp V.

* * *

Oksana lugs their suitcases into the back of a bright red sportscar, and then drives them at insane speeds through the town. She cranks the radio up. She bellows along to it. She seems manic – Irina can’t tell if it’s from excitement or not. It’s probably from That’s Irina’s house.

That’s her house.

It whips past and it’s gone again and Irina wants to sit up in her seat, _wait_ , wants to make Oksana stop the car, _wait_ , but they’re going too fast, it’s taking everything to not be carsick and she knows this street. They turn onto another street and she knows that street. A third street; she knows it; this is her home, they are careening past sidewalks Irina has trudged along while thinking about stupid things, like math or living. Now her heart is in her throat, sick and fully aware of more important things. Like killing.

The car screeches to a stop in front of Irina’s school building, where six days or three months or forty-five years ago Oksana clicked the safety off of a gun and smiled like her gums were full of broken glass. The school is empty – abandoned – and Irina panics for a second before she realizes that oh, shit, it’s Saturday.

“It’s Saturday,” she says. “No one’s here. Are we—” (she swallows) “—casing it or something?”

“No, we’re not _casing it_ , this isn’t a spy movie.” Oksama drums her hands on the steering wheel. “Come _on_ already. Now I know why people cry at all those stupid dog movies, this is ridiculous.”

Irina stares at Oksana, heart writhing and wild in her throat. Oksana stares back at her and then flares her eyes, throws up her hands.

“Go!” she says. “Go! Shoo! Be free! Holy shit, you are so _stupid_. Get out of here, you stupid dumb dog.”

“What?” Irina says, and then: “Wait. I thought – what?”

Oksana twists in her seat so that she’s staring at Irina: frantic, pained. “You’re slowing me down,” she says patiently. “I thought it would be fun dragging a kid along, you know, reliving the glory days and all that, but it turns out that this sucks and I should have just left you in kindergarten. Okay? Now get out.”

Her eyes twitch faster and faster between Irina’s eyes; Irina can feel the phantom weight of Oksana’s palm on her eyelids every time she blinks. _Maybe you screwed up big time in there. Or maybe I—_

Irina reaches one slow hand to her seatbelt buckle and clicks it, lets it go. Oksana doesn’t move. She untangles herself from her seatbelt – Oksana doesn’t move. _Holy shit_ , says a giddy voice in Irina’s brain, and the reality of it seeps into her bones: her school, her classrooms, her desk by the window. The idea of the vast dizzying expanse of the universe, boring and full of math and entirely hers.

She stares at Oksana for a moment, her eyes full up to the brim with all of this, and then hurls herself across the car and hugs her.

“Don’t do that,” Oksana says, voice muffled. Her arms are still by her side. “Stop reminding me how tiny and fragile you are and how easy it would be to break all of your bones.”

“Go on a date,” Irina says into Oksana’s bony shoulder. “Your love life is so terrible and sad it makes me want to vomit. Don’t shoot your next girlfriend or let her shoot herself or anything.” _Be safe, seriously_ , but the words are so big that they swell up and fill her whole throat and don’t come out. “Don’t kidnap anyone if she dumps you though.”

“Your advice is terrible,” says Oksana, giving Irina a few awkward pats on the back. “Go kiss Sophia or something, you little booger.”

“Get better insults, cunt,” Irina says, and lets go, and gets out of the car. Oksana makes a face at her in the rearview mirror and Irina makes it back while she opens the trunk, pulls out the suitcase full of beautiful things and blood money. She sets it down on the pavement, rolls it to the curb.

Oksana guns the engine and Irina yells “You sound like a man going through a mid-life crisis, get out of here with this.”

Oksana laughs. “Bye, stinkface!” she yells back, and peels away from Irina’s school with the screech of tires and the smell of burned rubber. Irina swallows and watches the thrilling red shape of Oksana disappear, and disappear, and disappear, and finally go.

Even when it goes, she keeps watching.

Then she swallows, wraps her hand around the handle of the suitcase, and begins the long slow work of dragging it back to her house.

* * *

A few weeks later, she gets a postcard from a city she has never been to. It has no return address; it reads only _DON’T WISH YOU WERE HERE. STAY IN SCHOOL. XX V_

Irina makes a face at it, for old times’ sake, and then pins it on her bulletin board.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't you wanna be evil like me?  
> Don't you wanna be mean?  
> Don't you wanna make mischief your daily routine?
> 
> Well you can spend your life attending to the poor  
> But when you're evil doing less is doing more
> 
> Don't you wanna be ruthless and rotten and mad?  
> Don't you wanna be very, very good at being bad?  
> \--"Evil Like Me," Descendants
> 
> ...in this fic the role of Villanelle will be played by Kristin Chenoweth, but specifically Kristin Chenoweth cosplaying Maleficent and doing the shaka sign.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed!


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